Oh Man!

Aggrieved Masculinity, Silicon Valley and the New Far Right

We are often told, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. This is where current tech fascism has one up on the left. Not by offering a new social model or economic alternative – but by fantasizing a violent rupture. In the tech world, the worship of disruption, the disdain for institutional legacy, and the desire to sever the future from the present all echo this logic. Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw is an emblem for this severance, for a future with no ties to the past.

In a similar vein, Trump’s supporters claim he is intentionally crashing the stock market, while his critics argue that he is recklessly upending the global economy. Former Greek finance minister Yannis Varoufakis calls it an "anti-Nixon shock"¹ – a move to dismantle the Bretton Woods system and thus put an end to the financial globalism that defined the postwar era.

This is not capitalism's collapse, but its mutation – call it technofeudalism.

So why would the US, who most profited from Nixon’s economic turn, initiate such a drastic break? One answer: because Chinese growth threatens US unipolarity. If sawing off one’s limbs will bring China to heel so be it. Meanwhile, the tech industry, once globalist in posture, is increasingly pivoting to state clientelism. With consumer markets fracturing, government contracts and public infrastructure projects become new lifelines. This is not capitalism's collapse, but its mutation – call it technofeudalism. And if tariffs trigger a stock sell-off, insiders can buy on the cheap. It’s a grift inside a world-domination plot. A tangled skein of wayward visions – white supremacists, masculinists, seasteaders, transhumanists, Bitcoin freaks, Islamophobes, neo-monarchists, and anti-semites – the new far-right is unified by revolutionary energy without a clear political content, defined solely by the idea that violence gives rise to the sublime.

Fascism, as Zeev Sternhell argues in his seminal work The Birth of Fascist Ideology, emerged as a cultural movement before becoming a political force.² Though this movement was composed of eclectic – and at times contradictory – elements, it cohered around the idea that history was not a chronicle of class warfare but an endless struggle against decadence. From this perspective Fascism has always been a revolt against capitalism. Not a progressive or left-wing revolt, but a romantic and reactionary revolt that faults capitalism not for resource exhaustion, immiseration or inequality but for corruption, decadence and effeminacy.

Aggrieved Masculinity

Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West, described Western Europe as a Faustian culture, constantly striving to overcome limits. The term 'sigma male' – which originated in masculinist subcultures, as a way to describe a self-reliant man who often operates outside traditional social norms – embodies this Faustian spirit, in a moniker that combines a constellation of figures: the rebel, the explorer, the visionary, the nerd, the outcast. Together, they came to represent the intersection between the manosphere, Silicon Valley and the new far right.

These are not just eccentricities – they are symptoms of a deeper techno-masculinist ideology, one that blends the hacker ethos with a prepper mindset, lionizes disruption, and dreams of an elite untethered from democracy, equity, and embodied limitations.

Silicon Valley CEOs now style themselves as transgressive visionaries, whose titanic achievements tower above those of lesser mortals. They also believe they are in the process of transcending the base mortal condition they were born into. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, 46, spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in pursuit of immortality. He describes any act that accelerates aging – like eating a cookie – as an "act of violence."³ Associating progeny with his own idiosyncratic quest for immortality, Telegram founder Pavel Durov claims to have sired 100 children via a sperm bank. He is also said to practice extreme fasting to improve mental clarity.⁴
These are not just eccentricities – they are symptoms of a deeper techno-masculinist ideology, one that blends the hacker ethos with a prepper mindset, lionizes disruption, and dreams of an elite untethered from democracy, equity, and embodied limitations. This cultural formation, centered on aggrieved and aspirational masculinity, draws deeply from the same ideological waters that gave rise to fascism.

Likely taking inspiration from the film Fight Club, IRL far-right activists Matthew Frost and Erik Ahrens were filmed pitching a "gentlemen’s club," illustrated with footage of muscular men training for combat. After the video leaked Ahrens described his project as "week-long retreats for character development and network formation among highly selected participants."⁵ Ahrens, who calls himself a consultant for the AfD, was also recorded discussing remigration with members of the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), a company that maintains far-right, pseudoscientific journals and podcasts to promote 'race science' to its public. In the same instance, he boasted the AfD is taking steps towards the establishment of a genetic elite and seemed to suggest that recruits could be transformed into an elite group modelled on the SS, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing: "It’s all in. We live for the race now."⁶ Among his other activities Ahrens is known for offering dating advice for young men on his social media posts. HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites. As the AfD distanced itself from Ahrens to protect its electoral image, he became an icon of the manosphere, a group of online communities composed by pickup artists, men's rights activists and Incels or 'involuntary celibates', young men who blame women for their sexless lives.

The mythos of the sigma male found fertile ground in Silicon Valley, where transgression has an economic dimension: 'disruption' – an abbreviated form of 'disruptive innovation' – a new-age version of early twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 'creative destruction' seeks to upend existing markets and displace established agents, products and values. Disruption is the entrepreneurial mantra of the tech industry – and a pivotal theme in the nexus between counterculture and tech or computer culture, in that it conflates the venture capitalist and the hacker.

Having missed the historical opportunity to create a techno-emancipatory social form, the figure of the hacker now reconciles the imperatives of self-reliance and individualism with prepper ideology.

No longer an experimental, collective subject, he becomes the self-sufficient lone wolf – the West Coast version of the American pioneer. From his perspective, anyone who stands in the way of "big thinkers" stands in the way of the wondrous potentialities only they can realize.⁷ Economically, this means that any entity – such as the liberal state, unions or social justice initiatives – that promotes diversity and equity, or redistributes wealth via taxation or welfare programs, is halting evolutionary history. Hence, the open hostility toward democracy. Persecuted by liberals, social justice warriors and snowflakes, the sigma male normalises racism and misogyny while fetishising IQ scores, rhetorical fallacies, and 'open debate'. The myth of entrepreneurship is a rejection of the welfare state and an affirmation of the world-making power of technology. This mirrors a crucial theme in fascist ideology: a Faustian will to power that seeks to mobilize every aspect of life in the name of progress.

Transhumanism

Long before the rise of digital technology, fantasies of superhuman enhancement interwove racist hierarchies with "great men theory." For the Futurist movement the limitations imposed by the human body were "the most obtrusive barrier separating the subject from an authentic experience of life." Technology alone, the futurists contended, understood as an "extraorganic organ, is capable of providing the fullest expression of the will in all its creative and destructive capacity."⁸ Julian Huxley, the British biologist who, in 1968, coined the term "transhumanism", envisioned evolution as a conscious march toward a higher evolutionary state, led by exceptional men.⁹ Only the chosen few, Huxley argued, can steer evolution and determine its future direction. In his joint book with G. P. Wells, The Science of Life, Huxley warns that "the dead-weight of inferior population may overpower the constructive few,"¹⁰ thus threatening humanity. He also argues that intelligence is hereditary. The Science of Life ends with the prophesy of a scientific rapture (what later transhumanists would call the Singularity), in which some humans transcend humanity to become a ‘new race’.

The best fictional example of early 20^th century transhuman aspirations is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1910 novel Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, which gives symbolic form to Futurism’s highly gendered and racialized conception of technological progress. The life project of Marfarka, the novel’s protagonist and Gazourmah’s progenitor, is to "bypass the 'vulva' and impregnate the ‘ovary’ that is the male spirit” in order to “procreate an immortal giant from one’s own flesh, without concourse and stinking complicity with a woman’s womb.” As Marinetti writes in the preface dedicated to his futurist brothers:

In the name of the Human pride that we adore, I tell you that the hour is near when men with broad foreheads and chins of steel will give birth prodigiously, by one effort of flaring will, to giants infallible in action… I tell you that the mind of man is an unused ovary… It is we who are the first to impregnate it!

— Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox, Middlesex University Press, London, 1998 [1909], p.3.

While it claims to be non-racial or post-racial, transhumanism exposes the persistence of racial hierarchies in fantasies of biotechnological transcendence that imagine 'rupture' as a metaphysical escape velocity, where violence gives birth to the sublime. These speculative scripts may exceed the actual capabilities of information technology – yet remain shackled to the trajectory of western metaphysics, regulated by substitutions derived from the same structuring metaphor, in which mind, masculinity and value converge.

The Singularity

"The coming technological singularity," or simply, the "singularity," – a term introduced by John van Neumann, and later popularized by Vernor Vinge in the 1990s – describes the moment when quantitative change transforms into a qualitative leap, and AI overhauls; then overrules, human intelligence. Since silicon life forms do not necessitate potable water or a breathable atmosphere, some singularity theorists lionize capitalist subsumption to the fullest extent of its creative and destructive capacity: the loss of the earth’s biosphere and of the carbon-based life it sustains, regrettable as it may be, is just collateral in the great technological acceleration which will ultimately bring about the higher evolutionary promise of AI.

Despite its liberal veneer, the tech industry has long upheld reactionary values – worshipping wealth, power, and visionary masculinity.

Whereas most of the far-right argues for planetary apartheid – ethnonationalism in their jargon – present-day transhumanists believe that a "genetically self-filtering elite" is already in the process of divorcing itself from those of average and below-average intelligence, in a process that will ultimately lead to a transhuman super race and to "a powerful leader making use of intelligence enhancement technology to put himself in an unassailable position."¹¹ Though a transhuman hyper-race might seem thus far unlikely, existing technology is already immersing us in the radical disruption proffered by the cyberlibertarian doctrine. Think how the gig economy skirts the social contract. Think how Project 2025 aims for the eradication of the administrative state. Despite its liberal veneer, the tech industry has long upheld reactionary values – worshipping wealth, power, and visionary masculinity. This is not a bug, this is a feature of the evolutionary schema that underpins it. This is also a feature of fascism. Oscillating between aspirational and aggrieved masculinity, Silicon Valley CEOs do not simply propagate violent ideologies, their political influence is the axis around which violence spins out of online forums to undo the social contract.

To return to transhumanism by way of conclusion: self-optimization, biohacking, extreme fitness, nootropics, and ultimately, fantasies of immortal life function as ways of inscribing a gendered vision of control, resistance, and redress onto the body.

Alternatively, you can reach for a chainsaw, like Elon Musk did, and chop the social body to pieces.